Re: Institutional repositories and digital preservation

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Stevan has done us a favor by straightening out priorities here, 
and emphasizing that preserving Green OA versions should not be a 
high priority right now. His vision of a day when author's Green 
OA drafts may be regarded as satisfactory and de facto become 
versions-of-record, however, is a nightmare for people like me, 
who actually do still believe that the value added by publishers' 
copyeditors is not something trivial and easily to be dispensed 
with.

Sandy Thatcher


>On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Richard Poynder wrote:
>
>>  [1] Should institutional repositories [IRs] be viewed as 
>>preservation tools?
>
>Not primarily. IRs' primary function should be to provide open 
>access [OA] to institutional research article output.
>
>>  [2] Should self-archiving mandates always be accompanied by a 'preservation
>>mandate'?
>
>Definitely not. (But IRs can, will, should and do preserve their 
>contents.) For journal articles, the real digital preservation 
>problem concerns the publisher's version-of-record. 
>Self-archiving mandates pertain to the author's-draft.
>
>>  [3] Should Gold OA funds be used to enable preservation in
>institutional repositories?
>
>Funds committed to Gold OA should be used any way the university
>or research funder that can afford them elects to use them
>(though does seem a bit random to spend money designated to pay
>for publishing in Gold OA journals instead to preserve articles
>published in subscription journals).
>
>But on no account should commitment to fund either Gold OA or
>digital preservation of the version-of-record be a condition for
>mandating Green OA self-archiving.
>
>>  More, including an interview with digital preservation specialist Neal
>>Beagrie, here: http://bit.ly/dur5EP
>
>Richard Poynder's Interview is, as always, well worth reading.
>Comments follow (linked version is at
>http://bit.ly/DigPreservVSoa ):
>
>Commentary on Richard Poynder's "Preserving the Scholarly Record:
>Interview with digital preservation specialist Neil Beagrie"
>
>The trouble with universities (or nations) treating digital
>preservation (which is a genuine problem, and a genuine
>responsibility) as a single generic problem -- covering all the
>university's (or nation's) "digital output," whether published or
>unpublished, OA or non-OA -- is not only that adding an
>additional preservation cost and burden where it is not yet
>needed (by conflating Green OA self-archiving mandates with
>"preservation mandates" and their funding demands) makes it even
>harder to get a Green OA self-archiving mandate adopted at all.
>But taking an indiscriminate, scattershot approach to the
>preservation problem also disserves the digital preservation
>agenda itself.

[SNIP]